Press release

The Buchmann Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its exhibition entitled Landscape?. The exhibition presents a selection of paintings by Zaha Hadid alongside photographs by Joel Sternfeld. While there are clear differences in both the forms of expression and the subjects represented in the works of the two artists, their juxtaposition establishes a fascinating dialogue between architecture and landscape.
Iraqi Architect Zaha Hadid (*1950, Baghdad) first found renown in the early 1980’s thanks to a series of drawings and paintings through which she developed reflections on the value and importance of the project in architectural works.
The Silver Paintings, displayed in Agra, address the theme of the relationship between urban landscape and architecture. Her works achieve an almost utopic dimension, as they do not show physical realities, but rather architectural possibilities, instead. Zaha Hadid experiments with new spatial concepts, researching a visionary aesthetic which touches all fields of urban design. Silver Paintings, and particularly their surfaces, their modulation of colour and their range of shades from light to dark, all contribute to creating a new representation of urban landscapes, somewhere between vision and reality. The value of her work is now of course, internationally recognised. For 2012, Zaha Hadid completed the London Aquatics Centre, one of the principal venues for London’s Summer Olympics.
The American photographer Joel Sternfeld (*1944, New York) began his work in the Seventies, after having studied theories of colour usually applied in architecture and painting. Sternfeld is credited as being among the first, along with William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, of raising the level of colour photography as a higher artistic and research form.
Also, his landscapes continue to widen the tradition of American documentary photography, which begun in the Thirties by Walker Evans. Sternfeld’s works often conceal a subtile sarcasm, which pushes the observer to question the problematic nature of observation itself. Another important characteristic of his works is the relationship, never apparently arbitrary, between colour and the subject represented. With the pictures displayed in Agra, thanks in part to their large dimensions, observers are able to lose themselves immediately in the natural landscapes of America and the history of Roman countryside.

On the same day, at 11am, Buchmann Lugano opens the exhibitionLandscape?ZAHA HADID
Buchmann Lugano
Via della Posta 2, CH-6900 LuganoOpening: Saturday, 24 August 2013 at 11am
Open Tuesday to Saturday, from 1pm to 6pm